Audio lessons learned: Voiceovers and internal vs external podcasts

Adding audio for email subscribers, improving the Episode Notes, and making a post show up in the Substack podcast tab (not just external podcasts)

Aug 06, 2024

This post is about what I learned while podcast-enabling my 2 Substack newsletters. It will mostly be of interest to other Substack writers. If that’s not you, feel free to skip it 😊 (You may want to update your section subscriptions to unfollow the Substacking section. Here’s how to manage sections.)

Audio voiceover is a great option for writers to be able to offer our subscribers. Many people have more listening time than reading time, and people with reading impairments may find audio more accessible.

Getting audio into a Substack article is straightforward. Steps are below.

Getting it into the Podcast tab and into external podcast apps is not as smooth as I had hoped, though. Here’s what I learned while configuring it for my two newsletters.

Note: This Substack help article says “Note: Even if you don’t plan to distribute to any podcast apps, you must go through the podcast creation flow to publish audio posts of any kind.” But it’s 5 years old, and this part of the advice seems to be outdated. Voiceover audio can be added without doing any podcast setup.

If all you want is to add audio voiceover to your post, and don’t care about the recording show up in a podcast (Substack or external), see the steps below under “How to add audio to a Post”.

1. How to add audio to a Post

If you’ve started a Post and you want to add audio voiceover - before publishing or after - here are step-by-step instructions on how to do it. (I’m writing it down to remind myself of the steps, as a checklist; maybe it will help someone else too.)

Start the new article as a Post and write it. :)
When done writing, DO NOT send it via email or app yet. (Otherwise, email subscribers will never see that you added voiceover. Any hoped-for accessibility benefits will be lost to them.)
1. If you want to be able to hyperlink section titles in Table of Contents (like I have above in this post), DO ‘publish’ it so you can get the correct hyperlinks, but DO NOT allow Substack to send it via web or app. That box is checked by default, so you need to uncheck it. You’ll get a warning that almost no one will read the post. That’s fine; you’re not ready for people to read it yet. After you add the audio voiceover and publish, the box will again be checked by default. People will get the post then, with the hyperlinks and the audio. Just know that doing this might inject a time lag into your post views “since it was first published”.
2. Alternately, you can hack the hyperlink section titles by looking at the pattern used in hyperlinks on other posts, and save yourself the intermediate publishing step. 😏
Start a recording app (I use Audacity). Use a good-quality microphone if possible, vs. a laptop or phone’s built-in mic (it’s definitely noticeable).
1. Speak the title and the subtitle, with about 1-second pause after each, then speak the post. Leave pauses of about 1 second before and after section titles in the post.
2. Edit the post text when you say things that don’t sound smooth. (Most efficient: Use the pause button in Audacity right away, and cut & re-record the rough part right then.)
3. Save the recording as MP3 with standard quality.
For podcast distribution, use Audacity to insert a standard pre-recorded intro for the publication in front of the post voiceover.
1. Keep the intro short (mine are 5 and 6 seconds).
2. Be sure to trim extra dead air at the start of the intro.
3. Leave about 1 1-1.5 sec gap between the last audible word of the intro and the start of the post voiceover (trim dead air at the start of that one, too).
4. Save the combined recording as MP3 with standard quality.

I haven’t decided yet whether an outro at the end is useful or important. I probably should add an outro, too. I’d love to hear what others think!

Go into edit mode for the post. Attach the audio voiceover MP3 using the headset icon in the toolbar and the microphone icon in the popdown menu:

An “Add voiceover” sidebar will open on the right. Click Select file, browse to the MP3 recording file (with the intro prepended, for podcast use), and select it for uploading. Click Done at bottom right to close the sidebar.

You’ll see this “Processing media…” dialog after the file is uploaded:

When it’s done, “Processing media” will be replaced by a widget for playing the recording, and the sidebar will look like this, showing a Play button and the recording duration:

Check the duration, play the recording a bit to make sure you uploaded the right file, then click Done to close the sidebar.

Now just publish your post as usual!

2. How to configure your Post audio for external podcast apps

If you do want to include your audio in an external podcast, some setup is needed in Settings for enabling Podcasts and synchronizing with the external apps. That isn’t covered here. If the standard Substack help articles 1 and support chatbot don’t get you going, comment or DM me and I’ll try to help.

Follow steps above for “How to add audio to a Post”.

Go to the post Settings (button with gear at lower right of the post writing window). Click the radio button which now appears just above “Social preview” to “Add voiceover to podcast RSS feed”. If the button is not there, it means your adding the audio to the Post was not successful; go back.
When the button is checked, a new section will open beneath it for Episode Notes. The notes will default to the text of your entire post (or as much as will fit, if it’s long). Click the theme-colored Save button below the Episode Notes, or your checkbox will be discarded.
If you want to change the Episode Notes, click the Edit word link at far right. I usually condense the text to a few introductory sentences, plus maybe a TOC if it’s a long post. If a post has a legal disclaimer, I include that in the episode notes too.
I often add the caption text from my Subscribe button at the bottom of the episode notes. Words in the caption text can be hyperlinked in the episode notes editor (publication URL plus “/subscribe”). I’ve discovered that this isn’t necessary, though. The syncs with external podcast apps seem to automatically add a line giving the Substack publication URL, so you don’t have to add that. (There are some variances in what they add. Details below 2.)
Be sure to click the Substack-orange Save button right below the edits,
and then click the theme-colored Save button below the Episode Notes, if you didn’t already.
If you go to another section of Settings to edit without first clicking both Save buttons, your edits (and your choice to add voiceover to RSS) will be lost.
If you end up re-recording or editing the audio before you publish, you can simply repeat step 5 of How to add audio to a Post to open the right sidebar, delete the old voiceover file, and repeat step 6 to upload a new one. Episode Notes and settings seem to persist unless you delete the audio file without uploading a new one before closing the sidebar.
When you click Continue at upper right to publish your post, you’ll have a chance to review these again.

Result: The emails that are sent to subscribers should include the voiceover link at top, and the audio will be synched to external podcast apps. My experience is that Spotify and Apple Podcasts will pick up a new post in an hour or few, while Overcast and Pocket Casts tend to pick them up the next day.

3. How to get your Post audio onto the Substack podcast tab of your newsletter

Short answer: YOU CAN’T.

If you follow the first set of steps above, the audio will be playable in the post.
If you follow the second set of steps, the audio will also go to the external podcast apps.
But there is no setting in Substack that will put that Post audio voiceover onto the Substack publication’s Podcast page.

If you want your post’s audio voiceover to show up in the Podcast tab of your Substack publication, you have to choose post type “Audio” from the very beginning. There is no way to convert an Audio episode to a Post, or vice versa, once you start writing. This locks a writer into deciding before starting to write whether they’re going to add Substack podcast audio to a post being written on Substack.

The Substack support bot says that not allowing Post audio to go into the Substack Podcast is a deliberate design decision. Somebody make it make sense. How is it in writers’ or Substack’s best interests to make it harder for writers to share their audio inside Substack than outside? (Is the internal podcast play section is being killed off in favor of external standards-based integrations?)

It looks like the Substack Podcast concept is: You’ve recorded an unscripted session outside of Substack whose transcript won’t be written into post text. All you’re putting into Substack is the recording plus a short blurb saying, listen to this interview. That may work for e.g. a 30-min or 60-min interview with a guest. But isn’t writing original words the whole point of Substack?
And what’s the actual value of adding such an audio recording to a Substack-only podcast episode with no original writing texts? (Unless the goal is to pull popular creators from other sites to get them to host their podcasts here?)

After you’ve created an Audio episode, the process for adding a recording to it is pretty much the same as in 1. How to add audio to a Post. You can also enable the audio recording to be shared to external podcast apps too. The steps are roughly the same as in 2. How to configure your Post audio for external podcast apps.

Assigning episodes to a section didn’t work as I had hoped. I had already set up a podcast for my publication. When I created an Audio episode and assigned it to a section of my newsletter, the Settings prompted me to set up a new Podcast for that section.

There was no apparent way to simply use the existing top-level newsletter’s podcast for the section - other than, don’t assign the episode to a section. I tried clicking “Set up podcast”. I got a prompt to choose an audience for the podcast. Oddly, all of the sections were selectable, not just the section this Audio episode was assigned to. (Choosing a different audience list might have actually reassigned the episode to the selected section.) I couldn’t choose the main newsletter as the audience; it was grayed out. Mousing over it showed “This newsletter already has a podcast”.

At this point, the apparent value of the Substack-only podcast had fallen below the point of return on effort, and I gave up.

What’s Next?

I’ve seen some publications handle this by creating one Episode and one Post for each article. After the effort it took to figure all this out, I understand WHY they do it. But as a subscriber, it’s kind of annoying to get two emails about one article. And neither email has both the text and the voiceover link.

❌ It shouldn’t be this hard. Substack UX and Design, please fix this user experience for writers and for readers/listeners.

My bottom line:

Trying to get my audio voiceovers into the Substack Podcast isn’t worth the effort of creating Episodes. I am abandoning it and disabling the Podcast tab in my publications. And I manually converted my first two draft Audio episodes to Posts. There’s no way to just change the type from Audio to Post; I asked, and the support chatbot confirmed that it’s a no.

I am going to experiment with holding off on publishing my Posts until I’ve added the voiceover audio tracks. Unless I hear from email-only subscribers that they are happier with using the external podcast apps, or don’t care about audio, it doesn’t seem fair to them to do otherwise.

One downside with the external podcast app synch: there’s no way to see play counts. The support chatbot’s answer was “Currently, Substack does not provide specific analytics for external podcast episodes published through its platform. You would need to check the analytics provided by the external podcast player or service where your podcast is hosted to see the number of plays for your episodes.” It doesn’t sound like those external play counts would be available even if I used the Audio post type, though. The Podcast tab is still only going to show internal plays.

I have some homework to do to see how each of the external podcast apps allows (anyone?) to see stats on a show or its episodes. Maybe for next month’s retrospective. 🙂

Substack help links on podcast setup:

What various external podcast apps add to the end of the Episode Notes:

Apple Podcasts adds “Get full access to <publication_name> at <publicationURL>/subscribe”. They also have an “Episode website” link which points to the Post, but does not bring up the Welcome page.
Spotify adds “To hear more, visit <publicationURL>”. It is a link to the newsletter, not the specific post. It brings up <publicationURL>/welcome if you have that enabled.
What Overcast adds depends on whether you have paid subscriptions enabled.
1. If so, Overcast adds: “This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit <publicationURL>/subscribe”
2. If not, Overcast adds: “Get full access to <publication_name> at <publicationURL>
Pocket Casts adds “Get full access to <publication_name> at <publicationURL>
Google YouTube Podcasts and YouTube Music Podcasts are pretty much the same thing, from a podcast publisher’s perspective. Publishing to one populates both UIs. YouTube also appends “Get full access to <publication_name> at <publicationURL>”.